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Sonority and Syllable Structure: the Case of Burmese Tone Kate Mooney & Chiara Repetti-Ludlow*

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Sonority and Syllable Structure: the Case of Burmese Tone Kate Mooney & Chiara Repetti-Ludlow* 2021. Proc Ling Soc Amer 6(1). 24–38. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4900. Sonority and syllable structure: The case of Burmese tone Kate Mooney & Chiara Repetti-Ludlow* Abstract. The relationship between tone and sonority has been a recurrent theme in the literature over recent years, raising questions of how supraseg- mental features like tone interact with segmental or prosodic qualities, such as vowel quality, sonority, and duration (de Lacy 2006; Gordon 2001). In this paper, we present an original phonetic study that investigates the relationship between tone, vowel quality, and sonority in Burmese. These are not simple to disentangle in Burmese, since the language has a unique vowel alternation system where certain vowels can only combine with certain tones or codas. While some researchers have analyzed these alternations as directly stemming from tone itself (Kelly 2012), we argue that the vowel alternations are tone- independent. We propose that the Burmese vowel alternations follow from general preferences on sonority sequencing (cf. Clements 1990), and so there is no need for tone and segmental quality to interact directly. Not only does this explain the complex vowel system of Burmese, but this proposal casts a new view on recurrent issues in Burmese phonology, such as the representation of underlying tonal contrasts and minor syllables. Keywords. tone; sonority; Burmese; centralization; diphthongization; minor syllables 1. Introduction. Burmese is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken throughout Burma/Myanmar by approximately 30 million people as a first language and another 10 million people as a second language (Watkins 2001). Although the phonetics and phonology of the language are relatively well-studied, the question of classifying Burmese tone has posed a prob- lem for researchers for over a century (cf. Stewart 1936; Sprigg 1964; Richter 1967; Bradley 1982; Tun 1982). This is due, in large part, to the fact that Burmese tone is not classifiable exclusively by pitch contour. Rather, researchers like Bradley (1982) and Watkins (2001) have claimed that the main correlates of tone are phonation type, duration, and pitch, while others, like Kelly (2012), have posited that vowel quality is also a main correlate of Burmese of tone, suggesting that tone interacts with the realization of individual segmen- tal phonemes. Furthermore, researchers have noted that part of the challenge of studying Burmese tone lies in the fact that there are likely effects of tonal sandhi that further alter the pronunciation of both the tone and neighboring segments (Watkins 2000), although no systematic studies of tonal interactions in Burmese have been done to the best of our knowledge. Despite the controversy over the main correlates of tone, researchers largely agree that tone falls into four major categories, which Watkins (2000) calls “low”, “high”, “creaky”, and “killed”. Several other researchers including Richter (1967) and Bradley (1982) also make the case for a 4-tone system, despite describing the tonal cues differently. Ultimately, re- searchers agree that the low tone generally starts with a low pitch, the high tone starts * Special thanks to Gillian Gallagher, Maria Gouskova, and audiences at NYU PEP Lab and LSA 2021 for com- ments. Authors: Kate Mooney, New York University ([email protected]) & Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, New York Uni- versity ([email protected]). © 2021 Author(s). Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY license. with a high pitch, the creaky tone has a weak glottal stop or creak, and the killed tone has a high onset pitch but is very short due to the presence of a full glottal stop coda. Watkins (2000) also argues that there is a distributional constraint on what vowels can appear with what tones; Set A: [a, e, E, i, o, O, u] (in open syllables), and Set B: [5, eI, aI, I, oU, aU, U] (in closed syllables). According to Watkins (2000), Set A vowels are always found in open syllables, while Set B vowels are found in syllables closed by nasalization or the killed tone. Thus, modal low, high, and creaky tones can appear with only the first set of vowels, while the killed tone and nasal low, high, and creaky tones can only appear on the second set of vowels. The Burmese vowel inventory is summarized in (1) and the conso- nant inventory is ssummarized in (2). (1) Burmese vowel inventory as described in Watkins (2000) Set A Set B (2) Burmese consonant inventory as described in Watkins (2001) Labial Dental Alveolar Postalveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Plosive/Affricate b p ph d t th dZ tS tSh g k kh P Nasal m m n n ñ ˚ñ N ˚N ˚ ˚ Fricative D T z s sh S h Approximant w û j Lateral l l ˚ 1.1. PROPOSAL. Building on previous work on vowel quality, tone, and syllable structure, we argue that the vowels in Set B are derived from the vowels in Set A in closed syllables (Figure 1). These changes are predictable from syllable structure, with high and low vowels centralizing in closed syllables, and mid-vowels diphthongizing in closed syllables. While previous researchers have argued that these alternations are not easily unifiable (Gruber 2011), we argue that there is a common core; sonority. Closed syllable nuclei either lax or diphthongize in order to minimize their sonority adjacent to a coda. We propose that this alternation stems from a cross-linguistic preference for there to be minimal sonority differences between the nucleus and coda (cf. Sonority Sequencing Principle, Clements 1990). One implication of this proposal is that Burmese may only have three tones: high, low, and creaky (CV). The three underlying tones are found in both open and closed syl- lables, but the syllable˜ nucleus centralizes or diphthongizes when there is a nasal or glottal stop coda. It is possible that the killed tones are underlyingly a high tone with a glottal stop coda, and undergo tonal contour alternations that minimize sonority adjacent to the glottal coda in isolation. In earlier work, creaky and killed tones were found to have near- identical tonal contours – in the following sections, we will see that this is not always the 25 case, which forms the phonetic basis for giving creaky and killed tones different underly- ing tonal specifications. In turn, this provides the basis for our argument that two vowel systems are not necessary to account for tonal data. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents two acoustic studies, which provide the phonetic evidence in favor of tone disambiguation that does not rely on vowel quality. Section 3 provides a sonority-based analysis for the Burmese vowel alternations, and shows how this enriches our understanding of minor syllables (Section 3.3) and underlying tones (Section 3.4). Section 4 concludes and discusses future directions for research. 2. Acoustic Study. In this section, we present two experiments on tonal real- ization in Burmese. The first experiment elicits tone in isolation, and is aimed at replicating results from previous studies with a wider variety of syllable onsets and rimes. Previous studies limited their anal- ysis to only /a/ (e.g. Watkins 2000; Gru- ber 2011) or only /i/ and /a/ (Kelly 2012), and this study aimed to confirm the gen- eralizations for a wider set of vowels and consonant onsets. The second experiment Figure 1. Proposed set of open syllable vowels elicits tones in sentential frames, with the (black) and closed syllable vowels (gray). goal of explaining some of the contradic- tory F0 variation reported in previous work (e.g. Bradley 1982; Watkins 2000; Kelly 2012). We hypothesize that some of the variability reported in tonal contours comes from sentence-level prosody, and that previous studies may have unintentionally included tokens with contrastive focus intonation. We also hy- pothesize that if Burmese is a language similar to Cantonese (cf. Peng et al. 2005), then sentential prosody may create sandhi-like alternations that are only predictable from un- derlying tonal specifications. The number of surface patterns across different prosodic contexts would thus give us a rough estimate of the number of underlying tonal distinc- tions needed in the language. To sum up, the experiments in this section have two purposes: (i) to confirm findings from previous literature and extend these findings to tone in different segmental contexts (varying onset, coda, and nucleus), and (ii) to expand our understanding of how tonal contours vary under different sentential prosody. Together, these studies will allow us to assess which correlates of tone are important in creating Burmese tonal representations and whether two sets of vowels are necessary to account for the tonal variation we see. 2.1. EXPERIMENT 1: TONE IN ISOLATION. Our consultant for this project was a female na- tive speaker of Burmese from the city of Yangon (also known as Rangoon). She is in her late 20s and has been living in the United States for approximately 10 years. In this exper- iment we provided our consultant with English translations of target words and asked her to repeat the Burmese translations out loud in isolation. For open syllables, target words 26 consisted of the consonants /p, ph, m, m, tS/ followed by each vowel (/a, e, i, o, u, O/).1 Wherever possible, we identified 3 minimal˚ pairs with our informant, such as [ka] (low tone) ‘protect’, [ka] (high tone) ‘car’, and [ka] (creaky tone) ‘dance’. The killed tone is only found with the closed-syllable vowels, and˜ was left for the closed syllable analysis. We also noted that /@/ is a vowel in the language, but only occurs in minor syllables that do not seem to carry tone (see Section 3.3). For closed syllables, target words consisted of con- sonants /p, ph, k, kh, m, m, tS, tSh, dZ/ followed by each closed-syllable vowel /5, eI, aI, I, oU, aU, U/.2 We identified˚ 4 tone minimal pairs wherever possible, as with [k˜5(n)] (low tone) ‘to kick’, [k˜5(n)] (high tone) ‘to lose sight’, [k˜5(n)] (creaky tone) ‘someone with an at- titude’, and [k5P] (killed tone) ‘adhesive’.
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